Writing, Acting, Living the Grace of God

Fiction

This is one of twelve short stories from my book, “Christmas on Pleasant Hill”, available from Amazon. I wrote it for adults, but most of the stories are good material for families. One fourth grader borrowed it from me and read the whole thing to his five year old sister! It’s set in College Hill, a Cincinnati neighborhood, so it has an added appeal to locals. Here’s the cover story:

THE BALLOONThe day before Christmas, three year old Damon sat up in his new big-boy bed, which was shaped like a red fire truck. He climbed onto its roof, about four feet from the ground, and did a flying dive onto a mattress, which his dad had put on the bedroom floor “for a few days”, when he had bought a replacement for it. That was a year ago, and Damon had safely mastered quite a few acrobatic moves because of it. It had been a fixture for so long, this queen-sized cushion for heroism, that he couldn’t remember living without it. When he visited his aunt on Thanksgiving, he had stared at the bare floor of his cousin’s room bewildered, and asked, “Where’s your mattress?”
Damon rolled around for a while, then somersaulted off the mattress and ran into the room of his sleeping parents. He scrambled onto their bed and jumped up and down until he tripped on his dad’s leg and fell in between his parents, who would have liked to sleep a little longer.
“Are you ‘wake, Dad?”
“Yeah, buddy. You’ve made that happen.”
“Can we go for pancakes now?”
His dad was going to take care of him all day long while his mom cooked for Christmas. They would go to the restaurant with the smiley-faced pancakes, followed by
riding the little train at the mall, and other fun things. They would do all these fun things one after the other, not like with his mom, who always had other things to do in between
the fun.
Damon’s dad, Will, stroked the little boy’s spikey hair, pulled him down on the bed and blew on his belly until the shrieking made his mom groan and cover her head with a
pillow.
“Come on, we’ll let Mommy sleep more,” Will said, and carried Damon out of the room. He was a hefty little kid, not fat but strong and muscled, with a round belly still, and soft chubby cheeks. Will loved how steadily cheerful he was,how ready to talk, learn and play at every moment. He might be obstinate or bossy sometimes, but he never
whined. In his monotone, matter-of-fact voice, he was always asking questions about how things worked. He had an enormous vocabulary, and an answer for everything.
When his preschool teacher asked him to do crafts, which he hated, he would say things such as, “I’d like to, but I just got my fingernails cut so my hands don’t work very well.”
Will took him to the pancake house, then up to a nearby funeral home that had a live nativity. They fed carrots to the donkey. Will told Damon that baby Jesus had been born in a place like this, out where the animals lived.
Damon stuck his hand into the greasy wool of a sheep as it stood by the fence. He examined his fingers, rubbing them together. Will assumed he had not been listening, but Damon asked, “Why didn’t they go to the hospital?”
“There wasn’t one back then. Babies were born at home, but Mary was far away from home in a crowded place and there wasn’t even room in the hotel.”
Damon peered in the shed where statues of Mary and Joseph, shepherds and baby glowed under spotlights.
“That’s not a real baby,” Damon observed. He stuck his lanolin-greased thumb in his mouth, but Will pulled it out. “Keep your hands out of your mouth, Damon, you’ve
got animal germs on them. You’re right, it’s not a real baby. Jesus was a baby a long time ago. He’s still here, but he’s…invisible now. We can’t see him.”
“Why doesn’t he ever show up? Santa does.”
Will thought fast, as he often had to with Damon’s incessant curiosity.
“The Bible says Jesus is always with us, forever and ever.”
“Well, I never see him anywhere.”
Will did not answer. He suddenly remembered having the very same thought as a child. He recalled the empty disappointment when he understood that no one ever
actually saw God. He didn’t know what to say to his son. “Should we go get a present for your mom now?”
When they finished their stop at the dollar store, where Damon had picked out a pair of pink socks with silver bells on them, (“Because mom’s a girl and girls like pink,”) and a
large plastic angel so luminous it possibly glowed in the dark (“Because Grandma likes pretty things and this is just beautiful,”) they went home for a nap. They laid together on
the couch by the Christmas tree. Damon smiled, settled in with his head on Will’s chest, and stuck his now-washed thumb into his mouth.
Will thought he was asleep, but then he opened his eyes, pulled out his thumb and said, “I still wish I could see the real Jesus like the shepherds did.”
“You’re still thinking about that?”
“Yeah.”
Will started to formulate a response about having to wait for the next life for that, puzzling over how to make this palatable to a three year old, then, on a better hunch, he
just said, “Me too.” Then he smiled and asked, “So if Jesus wasn’t invisible and you could see him, what would you do?”
Confidently, Damon answered, “We’d wrestle, and ride a swan.”
“A swan?” He guessed Damon was remembering a fall walk in a nearby cemetery where white swans glided around a lake.
“Yeah. In heaven there’s lakes with big swans, and Jesus could ask them to give us a ride.”
“So what else is in heaven?”
He shrugged with a frustrated frown. “I don’t know. I can’t get up there.”
Will went up on an elbow so he could see Damon’s face.
“I know what you mean. Sometimes I just want to go right up to Jesus and talk to him. I wish I could see into his eyes.”
“He should show up. Then we could give him a present.”
“Well, when you give other people presents, like Mom and Grandma, it’s kind of like you’re giving them to Jesus. He really likes it when you do that.”
The boy’s head shook back and forth patiently. “It’s not the same thing, Dad.” He snuggled against Will’s chest and fell asleep.
When Damon woke up, he lifted one of his father’s still-closed eyelids.
“I have an idea,” he whispered, his face a few inches away.
“Why are you whispering? You woke me up.”
Much louder, he said, “We could get him a balloon!”
Will rubbed his eyes. “Who?”
“Jesus! It’s his birthday and no one ever gets him anything. If we get a balloon, and let it go up in the sky, he can catch it.”
Will grabbed him, lifted him high and brought him back for a hug. “That’s a great idea, buddy.”
Right away, before the stores closed, Will dressed Dammon in his red coat and drove him to a party store that made helium balloons. They got a red one that said, “Happy
Birthday” on it. Will wrapped it several times around Damon’s hands and tied it.
“We’ll save it for tomorrow morning.”
Christmas morning, Damon had his parents up as early as they had feared.
They would not let him open his stocking or any presents until they had made coffee.
Damon said, “Well, then, I’m getting my coat on and my boots on and I’m giving Jesus his balloon.”
His mom deferred making coffee to throw on a coat and join him. Will hastily followed, grabbing his camera. He handed Damon the balloon, which was still tight and
buoyant, pressed against the ceiling. Will prayed that it would rise in the cold outside.
Will got the picture just as Damon let go of the string, the crimson coat and balloon against the green of juniper bushes. Damon’s eyes were wide and shining.
“Say something to Jesus,” his mom urged.
As the balloon rose and diminished in the cold clear sky, Damon yelled, “Jesus – get that balloon!”
They sang happy birthday as it disappeared.
Will took Damon’s hand. “He’s got it. He got your present.”
“Yeah,” Damon nodded with satisfaction. “Now, he won’t feel left out.”

This is the last section of the short story, “Kyle Helps Santa”, from “Christmas on Pleasant Hill.” This is one of 12 stories in the book, available from Amazon. To read “Kyle Helps Santa” from the beginning, click here.

When Christmas Eve arrived, Kyle’s excitement about delivering presents to Andre turned into fear. He had a plan. He had a clear description of which house Andre lived in; one from the corner with the nasty couch on the porch. But the obstacles that had seemed like no big deal loomed enormous that night, when Kyle climbed into bed. He knew he needed to wake up before it was light outside. He didn’t want to deliver the gifts in the middle of the night though, because he didn’t want them stolen. He was going to knock on the door, hide and wait for someone to come and take the bag inside.

He had asked his dad when it would get light on Christmas morning and his dad had said, “Don’t worry about that, buddy. You’re not going to get us till it’s eight o’clock, no matter how long it’s been light.”

Kyle googled, “When does it get light?” and the sun calculator told him seven fifty-two. That was too late. People would be up and around by then. He set his phone alarm for 6:30 am.

When the alarm went off, Kyle turned it off as quickly as he could. He put on boots and a coat over his pajamas. He picked up the bag, which he could barely carry, and walked out to the stairs. The boards of the old house creaked alarmingly. His parents wouldn’t notice at first, thinking he was going to the bathroom, but he knew if he took the stairs they might get up and tell him to go back to bed. So he wound the top of his bag around his wrist twice, and, wincing at the weight of it, held it over the stairway railing, letting the thick wood rail take most of his weight. He carefully moved sideways down the stairs, holding the bottom of the bag with one arm and keeping most of his weight off his feet. It worked. The creaks could barely be heard as he slid himself down the railing. He hauled the bag to the back door, and slipped outside, closing the door softly behind him.

Outside, the ground was covered with snow, and the cold of the air made him gasp. As quickly as he could, he moved to the place at the back fence that was easiest to climb. It loomed high in the darkness, and he realized he had no plan for how to get such a heavy bag over it.

He couldn’t risk dropping a game system. It took all his strength to get the bag to the top, but the fence was smooth on the other side and if he tried to slide, the weight of the bag would make him fall. A car passed by, its headlights flashing through the trees. Kyle froze, afraid the world was waking up and he was running out of time. Tears of frustration clouded his vision. He couldn’t slide and he couldn’t risk dropping the bag. Then he thought of lowering it with a rope. He had a rope in his tree house.

It was excruciating to haul the bag back over the top of the fence, slowly climb back down and run to the tree house. Adrenaline zinged through his arms and chest as he ran through the snow, aware that he could be seen from his parents’ bedroom window. He felt an intense urge to pee, but ignored it. He grabbed the rope, glad he had untied it from the tree last week when he was pretending to be a cowboy. He looped it three times around the bag, double knotted it and went through the whole painful climb again, carefully lowering the bag to the ground on the other side.

He was glad to find that the tied-up bag was a little easier to carry. He stomped through the snow as fast as he could, through the neighbors’ side yard to the street. He paused at the curb. He had never crossed the street alone before. Looking both ways twice, he breathed deeply and trudged across. He felt like a runaway who was leaving home for good.

As he faced the empty street ahead, his heart thumped hard. He had never been out alone, and it was dark. Passing the park out in the open he felt exposed, with the lights of a retirement home illuminating him. But it was worse when he cleared the park and had to walk past small, dark houses. He was afraid of someone looming behind every tree and car, ready to grab him.

When a car came down the street, he crouched behind a parked car, shaking with fear. It was going so slowly, he was sure it must be his dad, looking for him. Slowly it passed and crawled around a corner, leaving him in the dark again. Staying still had rooted Kyle in his fear. He had an urge to drop the bag and run home. He slowly rose and looked ahead. The end of the street was only four houses away. He was almost there.

He found the right house, the couch on the porch lit by a street lamp. He climbed up onto the rickety porch, carefully set the bag down just to the left of the door. He looked for a door bell but there was none. He would have to knock. He looked around for a hiding place, settled for a car parked nearby on the street, closed his eyes and thumped hard three times. He tore down the stairs, slipped on the second last one and fell. He scrambled up and dashed to the car. He hid behind it, terrified that another car would come down the street and spot him.

It seemed as though minutes passed. He wondered if he should go knock again. He waited for another car to crawl down the street, crouching down near the parked car’s headlights to stay hidden, hoping the driver didn’t look in the rear view mirror. He decided to go knock again. This time he pounded as loudly as he could, seven times, then closed the top of the bag into the screen so it could not be missed.

Right away a light came on behind the door. Kyle ran to the edge of the porch and threw himself over the railing and down into a bush, crouching lower than the porch just as the door opened. It was not Andre. It was a woman, thin and small in a big t shirt. She put her head out of the screen door, then touched the bag with her leg and looked down. She untied the rope and opened it. She opened it wide, to the light from the street, and examined the contents, bending over.

Kyle could see her through the bush, where he crouched frozen, afraid to breathe. The woman looked around. Then she stood up and leaned on the door frame. Kyle had a sinking fear that she would go back inside and leave the bag, but she just stood there. She looked up towards the street lamp, or maybe the sky. She put her hand to her throat and stayed there with the door open to the cold night, still as a statue. Finally her hand moved up to her face. She wiped under her eyes, she bent and picked up the bag, and she went inside.

Kyle stayed crouched in the bush for a minute or so, a smile spreading over his face. Then he ran across the little yard and up the street, barely aware of scratches on his hand and face from the bush, or the ache where he had fallen on his right knee. He ran, fearless and joyful, all the way up the street. As he reached his house, the joy persisted. Now he didn’t even care if he got caught.

He couldn’t climb the fence where he had escaped. He had to go all the way back to the place at the rear of the property where he and Andre came back from the woods. A tree trunk by the fence gave him height to reach the top and he swung himself over as smoothly as Andre had ever done it. As he neared the back porch, he saw his dad looking out the window.

His dad opened the door and stood there as Kyle made his way up the snowy steps. “What are you doing outside before seven in the morning on Christmas?”

“Well you said not to wake you up till eight.”

His father touched the scratch on his face. “What were you doing out there?”

Kyle wiped some blood from the scratch on his hand, looked up at his father and said, “Nothin. I was just helping Santa.”

This is the third section of the short story, “Kyle Helps Santa”, from “Christmas on Pleasant Hill.” This is one of 12 stories in the book, available from Amazon. To read “Kyle Helps Santa from the beginning, click here.

That night Moriah lay in bed staring through an uncurtained window at a street light. Andre was in a sleeping bag beside her; he had heard scratching noises in the wall of his room and was afraid to stay there. She looked at him in the beam of light, at his beautiful face, narrow like his dad’s, but with her large eyes. She hated that she had brought him to this broken down house, to this uncle who had been such a joy to her in her childhood but who now was as broken down as his house. She felt trapped. Andre’s dad’s people were no good, her brother was in a group home, her auntie in Atlanta already had a house full of kids and grandkids. This uncle was her only option. She would have to make it work. They were one drunk of an old man away from homelessness. She let some tears spill out of her eyes. She realized, having cried twice in a day, how much she had let herself hope for a new start. She felt foolish.

She kept seeing Andre’s face on Christmas morning, twisting in disappointment that there was nothing to unwrap. Her biggest fear was that this hopeful, optimistic child would become bitter. Just before going to sleep tonight, he had said, “It ain’t so bad, Mom. There’s a park, and basketball courts and a pizza place. It’ll be alright.”

Moriah could see herself getting this house cleaned up and livable. She could see herself finding some emergency help to get food and bus fare. She could even see herself getting a job. But she could not imagine how she was going to find money in time for this boy to get presents on Christmas morning. She wished she could pray. She had not been able to pray since her mother had died. It seemed as though there was a wall between the light of faith and the darkness of life and she was on the wrong side of it. She stayed awake for a long time.

***

After Andre’s first visit, Kyle could not stop thinking about how the boy did not get what he wanted for Christmas.

That night he asked his father, “Dad, is Santa always right?”

“Santa? Yeah, I guess so. Why?”

“Well how come I get what I want, but other kids don’t?”

“Well, maybe they ask for stuff they shouldn’t have. Like, say, if you asked Santa for a car, he wouldn’t give you one because you’re too young.”

“But what about when they just want games rated E or something, and all they get is a sweat suit?”

“Who only got a sweat suit?”

“I don’t know, I just heard of it.”

“Well, maybe that kid wasn’t very good that year.”

“But my friend Andrew’s never good and he got rockets last year. That’s what I want this year – rockets.”

“Well, I guess Santa can arrange that.”

“But why does Andrew get rockets when he’s bad and other kids get crummy stuff?”

“Buddy, you’re asking too many questions. You need to go to bed.”

Kyle couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking of Andre getting up on Christmas morning and having nothing. He considered writing a letter to Santa but feared there would not be time for it to reach the North Pole before Christmas. Then he wondered whether Santa might just get things a little mixed up once in a while; he had so far to go in one night. Maybe some of the presents Kyle was getting were meant for Andre; they lived close, and they were about the same age. Sometimes the mail people got letters mixed up, and he always got so much stuff, more than one kid needed. This explanation rang true for Kyle, preserving the benevolence of Santa, if not his omniscience.

Kyle decided it must not happen again. He would give some of his presents to Andre. But as he thought it through he realized that wouldn’t work. Andre would still wake up and be disappointed that nothing had come to his place, and it was not likely that Kyle’s parents would understand. They probably wouldn’t let him take half his Christmas haul down to Andre, especially since he wasn’t supposed to know Andre in the first place. Then he got an idea. He could give Andre some of his old stuff that still looked new. His parents wouldn’t notice. His dad used the telescope sometimes, and sometimes they built with Legos together, but they didn’t pay attention to his other toys. He had put his old game system in the closet when he got the new X box, so he could give that to Andre, and the games that went with it.

The next day he got a big plastic garbage bag from the kitchen when Ania was cleaning the bathroom. He ran it up to his room and put the game system in it, in the original box, with all its cords and controllers and games. He hid it in his closet under some clothes, and over the next few days added to it things he thought Andre might like: a board game he had never opened, a book about pirates, a foam football that looked new, and two of his nine action figures. The action figures were a true sacrifice; he even included Batman. The bag got heavy, so he snuck another bag for reinforcement.

Kyle’s regular level of excitement about Christmas multiplied.

In the days before Christmas, Kyle saw Andre almost every day. The weather grew colder and Andre showed up with no gloves or hat. Kyle smuggled some out to him. They pretended they were in the Revolutionary War, fighting with George Washington in the middle of winter. Kyle had learned to scale his back fence, gaining access to the woods behind his house, which extended for miles to the west and south. They slid on a frozen creek bed. They spotted rabbits, deer, even an eagle. Andre had never been in the woods before. Kyle looked forward to every afternoon. He was in a new world with a friend to share it with.

Two days before Christmas, Andre said, “Can’t we go in your house? I’m cold.”

Kyle winced. “I know, but if my parents find out I’ve been sneaking around, they might not let me play with you.”

“Well when it gets all snowy we can’t be playing in the woods all day.”

Kyle sighed. “OK. I’ll ask them. But we have to wait till after Christmas. Let’s just keep everything quiet till Christmas is over.”

Here’s the second section of the short story, “Kyle Helps Santa”, from “Christmas on Pleasant Hill.” To read it from the beginning, click here

Moriah Harris was not a woman to cry easily. She had lived through the early deaths of her parents, the shooting of her brother that had left him paralyzed from the waist down, and the desertion of her son’s father when her son, Andre, was two. Tears had played a limited role in all of these tragedies. She had allowed them for a few minutes at night after she went to bed; otherwise she did the next thing that had to be done, with a set jaw and no complaining. She found it best to keep her expectations low.

Even so, she found her eyes stinging and an awful lump rising in her throat the day she arrived at her uncle’s house in Pleasant Hill. Both the uncle and the house, which she had not seen since childhood, had deteriorated beyond recognition.

“This where we gonna live?” Andre, now eight, whispered as they waited for the door to be answered. His mom had told him over and over what a nice house it was. Now, the yard consisted of little but patches of dirt and garbage. An ancient green vinyl couch crowded the porch, stuffing spilling from the tears. When her uncle came to the door, he looked twenty years older than she expected and she could smell the alcohol on him from three feet away.

“Come on in,” he said, mustering cheer, rubbing bleary eyes. “It ain’t so nice as when your auntie was around.”

It didn’t look like he had done any cleaning in the three years since she had died. When Moriah followed her uncle into the kitchen, she saw two dead mice in traps in the corner. That’s when the tears threatened to take her over.

Moriah had lost her job, and lost the job she got after that, lost her car, then her apartment. She had made it to Cincinnati by bus with the last of her money, hoping for a new start at her uncle’s.

As the uncle rummaged for some food, Andre repeated, “This where we gonna stay?” His face wrinkled in distaste.

“Shhh,” she hissed back. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

***

Andre got out of the house as soon as he could, to explore the neighborhood. He walked up and down the main street. His mom said she remembered a big grocery store, a hardware store and the best barbeque place in Cincinnati. He didn’t see any of those. It looked like the place had gone downhill, kind of like his uncle. But there was a pizza place and a dollar store right around the corner, and a church that had a big parking lot with basketball courts, so he figured he could survive.

Pleasant Hill was an odd place to Andre, coming from an Atlanta suburb where everything was new. This place was a mix of ghetto and fairy tale. He would see a string of empty storefronts with garbage and leaves cramming the doorways, then look around a corner and see a beautiful old house glittering with Christmas lights. The big stone church less than a block from his house had a tall bell tower that looked like something out of a storybook, but next to it was a nasty looking convenience store with a bunch of young guys loitering in front of it, even in this cold weather.

At the other end of his street he found a park with a ball field and a good playground. That lifted his spirits a little. There was a water fountain that worked. That would help in case the water ever got turned off. He was trying out the swings when he looked across the street and saw a blond boy about his age looking through the iron bars of an ornate fence. He slowed the swing, jumped off, and crossed the street. He stopped near the boy, surveying the giant house behind him. It was painted three different colors. Then he looked at the boy. He was wearing brand new Nikes, top of the line.

Kyle said, “Hi.”

Andre asked, “You live in that big house?”

“Yup.”

“Is there much to do around here? I just moved in down there,” he pointed down his street, which Kyle’s house faced, as though Andre’s street was one long driveway to it.

“I don’t know,” Kyle answered. “I’m not allowed to leave the yard.”

“That’s crazy.”

“I know,” Kyle sighed. “My parents treat me like a baby.”

“You never leave this place?”

“I have to have one of them with me.”

Andre shook his head in disbelief. “You got a lot of toys in there?”

“Yeah. I’ve got an X Box 1 and I just got the new Mario.”

“Before Christmas? You rich?”

“I don’t know.”

“You live in a house like that with a lotta toys, you rich. Can I come in?”

Kyle shook his head sadly. “I’m not allowed. The gates are locked and only my mom or dad or Ania can open it.”

Andre looked up at the spikes at the top of the gate bars. “This thing go all the way around?”

“There’s a wood fence at the back.”

“How about I climb it and sneak in?”

Kyle bit his lip, torn between fear and longing. “I can’t take you inside. Ania will see.” Then he brightened. “But I’ve got a tree house back in the woods; I could show you!”

Andre scaled the back fence with an ease that made Kyle jealous. They ran from tree to tree like spies, then scrambled up wooden slats into the tree house. Kyle hoped Ania wasn’t looking out any back windows.

“This is awesome,” Andre said in low tones. “I can see the church tower. I can see part of the ball field too. I could see the whole town if your house would get outa the way! If you had some of them binocular things, we could spy on everyone.”

“I’ve got a telescope,” Kyle offered. “Wait here.” He scrambled out of the tree and ran into the house, soon returning with his telescope.

Andre ran his fingers along it. “You got something like this in your house? You rich for sure.”

Kyle showed him how to use it, then they played pirates because Andre remembered that pirates used telescopes. Kyle found that Andre was boss at pretending. First they were the pirates, then they switched to being crew on the ship being attacked by the pirates and battled with invisible pirates, then they were the pirates again, going through the jewels in a treasure chest, planning what they were going to buy.

Andre’s brows knitted, and he lowered the telescope. “I hate Christmas. I just get clothes and some dumb little stuff like a water pistol. I never get what I want.”

“Not even from Santa?”

Andre looked at him sideways and gave a strange little laugh. Kyle was floored. He had always assumed everyone got what they wanted from Santa, as long as they didn’t ask for a weapon.

“Did you ask him for guns or knives?”

“I don’t ask for nothing because I won’t get nothing.”

Then the boys saw a car drive into a carport behind the house. They both dramatically dropped to the floor of the tree house. “You gotta go before she sees you,” Kyle urgently whispered. “Wait.” He watched his mother go into the house, then said, “Quick now, while she’s taking off her coat and stuff. Quick!”

Andre was down the tree and over the fence in a few seconds. Kyle wished he had thought to ask him to come again.

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“Christmas on Pleasant Hill,” my book of Christmas short stories set in our Cincinnati neighborhood, is a collection of twelve fictional stories in real places, that give us a glimpse into the lives of its diverse people; old and young, rich and poor, black and white. I’ll be posting one of the stories in blog-sized segments this holiday season, starting this week:

Kyle Helps Santa

When it came to decorating for Christmas, the town of Pleasant Hill gave a patchy performance. Some of the grand old houses were beautifully done-up, with lights spiraling down their columns and outlining their turrets.

The streets of the newer developments were bright and cheerful – although even ‘new’ in Pleasant Hill meant forty years old. Yards busy with statuary showed Santa fraternizing with shepherds and wise men, snowmen sharing space with the holy family. But many of the streets had smaller houses, where life was too low budget for decorating. Most of them boasted no more than a door wreath, or a tree peeking out the window, if anything. In the big apartment complexes that offered government housing, there was no evidence of Christmas at all.
No blanket of snow had yet arrived to offset the drabness of the bare trees. It was just bleak and cold. There were not many kids outside.

This, however, did not stop Kyle Sorensen from wandering around his big front yard each day after school, kicking at stones, watching squirrels, seeing how many times he could run up and down the driveway before he was completely winded. His was one of those houses with lights outlining its impressive Victorian form. His parents were painstakingly restoring it.

Loneliness could be traced in the slight downturn of Kyle’s mouth and the searching motion of his eyes. The cheerfulness of his new winter outerwear, all coordinated in oranges and olive greens, did not match his serious face. He stayed outside, even on the cold drab days, because it felt less lonely than inside.

He could watch kids playing across the street in the community center playground, where he could not go unless a parent was with him. He was literally locked in his front yard with its iron fence and ornate electronic gate, but he could pretend that kids were about to come and play with him, and once in a while someone would talk to him as they passed.

It would chagrin his mother when she drove up to the gate at six o’clock or so, to see the boy standing in the bare, dark yard, peering through the iron bars. She just had a wall knocked out between his bedroom and the room next to it to make a large play area. The room had a space theme, with planets and moons suspended in mid-air, wallpaper of sky and clouds above the chair rail, fluorescent stars on the ceiling. The kid had his own galaxy up there and here he was, peering pathetically through cold bars.

“What are you doing here?” she would ask, then before he answered, “Did you practice piano?”

“Yeah.” Ania the house keeper always supervised his piano practice as soon as he got home from school.

“Well, what are you doing out here in the cold?’

He shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Don’t you like all your toys?”

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t there anything on TV? ‘Blue’s Clues’ or something?”

He hadn’t watched ‘Blue’s Clues’ for years. He was seven now.

“No, Mom.”

“Well, tomorrow I’d like you to find something to do inside. You’ll catch a cold out here.”

But he would always go outside as soon as piano practice was over. The big house was too still, with no one but Ania vacuuming or chopping vegetables. She was a quiet person and did not speak much English. “Snack ready for you,” and “Piano now, Kyle,” was about all she said.